He wept into his hands not only from relief but from something harder to name: the sense of a wound he’d thought permanent being, impossibly, partly healed.

The place that had taken Adanna had just given Ifeoma back.

It did not undo the first loss; nothing would.

But it meant the hallway was no longer only a place of endings.

It could be, it turned out, a place where someone you loved was returned to you.

And a man who had organized four years of his life around avoiding that corridor sat in it now and let it become, at last, something other than the worst day of his life.